


Portrait of An Artist to as Far as He Got

by dancerinthedrink



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Artists, Backstory, Childhood, Friends With Benefits, Growing Up, M/M, Not Beta Read, Oxford, Painting, Unrequited Love, canon ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-28 18:43:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19400119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancerinthedrink/pseuds/dancerinthedrink
Summary: As he lays dying in Dorian Gray's attic, Basil recalls the winding path that led him to this fate.





	Portrait of An Artist to as Far as He Got

Basil was six the first time he ever produced a drawing.

Nanny had been an ardent fan of Beethoven and encouraged an affinity for the piano, much to Basil's father’s chagrin. He had no ear for music and less patience for artists of any medium, but Nanny had raised his two eldest daughters - a pair of charming white lilies - and, at the ages of ten and thirteen, their impending entrance into society looked more promising than ever, so Nanny got her way and purchased tickets to the Symphony off her own wage to expose Basil to the genius of _An die Freude_ , not discouraged in the least whenever he napped in the velvet cushioned seats.

The pen had been left out by accident, his mother made a swift exit from her writing desk and Basil tugging adorably on her skirt hem to greet (who was it now? The Gloryfolds? The Lentons? Yes, he remembers the smear of Lady Lenton’s rouge against his cheek when she picked him up for a coddle) the intrusive guests.

He clambered up on the hastily abandoned chair and played at being grown-up, writing out letters to the only people he knew, Grandmamma and Grandpoppa, his sisters, Nanny. At that time he was able to print the alphabet though he had no knowledge of spelling, so when he imagined telling Nanny of the new horse the groom had exhibited to Father he could only sketch the creature out. 

It was the single most important moment of his life. Yet after it occurred, he rarely thought of it at all. 

Nanny was very disappointed when he presented it to her, disappointed he had ruined a sheet of Mummy’s good embossed paper so he ambled off to his sisters who had cooed over it, showering praise and kisses on him and kept it in a scrapbook for him which had been all the succor he needed.

That Christmas a sketchbook manifested from Santa’s sack under the tree, though, from Ida and Lucy’s matching smiles, he knew they pooled their pocket money to buy it for him. Nanny would have been in a state if Mummy hadn’t given her a new little boy just before Boxing Day to occupy her. It was also around Christmastime that Basil was moved from the nursery to make way for the new baby, on his own choice of course, Mummy wanted him to stay until he was at least ten but he countered with the fact that he couldn’t do his growing right if he was awakened at all hours by Ogden’s squawling.

The new room was soon wallpapered with amateur renderings of all the mares in the stables, the hunting dogs, the ducklings that lived in the little pond the family strolled past on their teatime walks. 

When he turned ten he, shamefaced, ripped those same drawings from the wall. 

A painter, charmingly named Graham Cunningham, had accompanied the Lady Hallingsworth - as her paramour, so said the vicious gossip of the time - to a dinner party and set up a temporary harem with his promise to reproduce the visage of any pretty lady in under twelve minutes in paint. Basil caught him at a free moment just after sunrise when he had his easel out on the lawn, painting the housemaid Tilly on the patio, and instead of shooing him away, as most men were apt to do when he found them alone with Tilly, invited him to sit beside him, watching Tilly, who he often saw bent over a fire or patting off a mask of perspiration, transformed into a duchess under the artist’s skilled brush. 

Cunningham left Monday in a hush of scandal that Basil was never privy to, but on that morning he was able to impart the adage to the young man of the house that variety was the spice of life, so Basil resolved to forgo his zoological cartoons to fixate on sharpening his skills of realism. For hours at a time, the servants could find the heir bent over on his knees reproducing the shadows of the wainscotting on his sketchpad until the light faded and he could see no more.

At twelve he was granted his first set of paints. The family was summering at Brighton and Father got it in his head that Basil might have a go at the waves, gifting him a set of blues, grays and greens and a horsehair brush; it gave him something to watch while his wife was wrapped up in the plot of her latest vogue novel and his daughters shyly walked down the length of the beach with the nephews of Lord Phenear. The shifting nature of the waves proved a difficult subject to capture, as well as being quite trite, so he resorted to the apprehending of sand crabs and a return to his childhood fancies of animals. The crabs led to his first sale of a painting for the price of one pound to the hotel proprietor’s daughter who hung it in his suite in his honor.

On the return home, Basil co-opted his sister’s French lessons as a time for them to sit for him. Together the siblings created a series of paintings where the sisters would play the role of city orphans experiencing the majesty of the countryside, Odgen seated on their knees to add another layer of pity. Even Mummy joined in on the fun, taking Lucy’s old frock skirts and stitching them up into a ragged shawl to play a beleaguered Nancy in the Garden of Eden.

He painted Tilly too. Tried to find what Cunningham found so attractive in her plain figure. She blushed at his attention, the way he peered so closely at her face, and made an effort to look pretty, plaiting her hair at night so it comes out in waves when pulled loose, pinching her lips and cheeks to redden, he saw her once practicing giggling in a mirror and consulting notes. He was sixteen when she reached to the inside of his thigh while he was showing her the finished product of one of his endevours. Brow molded with confusion, he pried her hand off and continued his explanation. 

He knew - was told - that it was well within his rights to have dalliances with the kitchen staff as long as he took pains not to get them with child which was not a trouble for him because he never had any interest in the female servants. Whenever he passed them dusting or sweeping he never thought to linger. He liked looking at the footmen though in their starched livery. There was one, Leland, several years older than himself he exchanged smiles with and when that happened a fizzy lightness would enter his head like the effervescence of a glass of champagne.

As a young man of eighteen, he did what was expected, kissed Mummy, Ida, and Lucy on the cheeks, mused Odgen’s hair, received a firm handshake from Father and set off on the train to Oxford with paints tucked covertly in the pockets of his packed trousers. 

He met the Lord Henry Wotton, a name he heard often at Eton though he never had the pleasure of encountering. On his first day at a party, Basil stumbled into the gentlemen’s to get peace from the rowdy drinking only to find Henry bent over a toilet, retching with the sound of a shot fox. “You won’t happen to have a cigarette, old boy?” he asked before he unleashed another sour stream of vomit. Out of the kindness of his heart, Basil let the drunken oaf throw his arm over his shoulder and take his bed for the night. Henry wasn’t in any better spirits when he awoke, the curse of a hangover afflicted him strongly and it fell to Basil to nurse him midnight after midnight until he learnt to hold his liquor. Naturally, they became great friends over the course of the term.

Henry, being the more bombastic of the pair, made friends easily while Basil, with his genteel manner, was able to keep those same friends from growing tired of Henry’s antics. 

Though Oxford dazzled the country boy, he never forgot his art and his attempts to get the student body to sit for him were legendary throughout campus. Whispers of, “Don’t let Hallward ask you for a painting. You’ll be there for weeks in silence and stillness,” were given as pieces of advice to freshmen like pub recommendations. He was lucky enough that their sisters delighted in having a handsome Oxford man scour their bodies with his soulful brown eyes and present them with a beautiful portrait for their troubles though they seldom returned to him after they realized there would be little conversation and even less flirting and his eyes felt more piercing than appreciative. 

At a loss for subjects, Basil turned to where many young men turned in times of desperation: the brothel. 

He paid prostitutes for their time and his mind expanded. Finally, he could paint a mixture of sin and virtue, a subject that had all the self-assuredness of the upper classes without their fear of ugliness. He learned so much from those prostitutes; he would have tipped them more generously if he could have sold the paintings, but alas there were no buyers for them.

Once the freedom of visiting the local female workers had fully set in, he began to expand his gaze to such boys of the same trade. Basil had always preferred to paint men over women. Though women were beautiful, the assumed perfect subjects, they all tried to look the same, the same age, the same hairstyle, the same dresses while men, already tormented with nearly identical fashions, stood out all the more in all shapes and sizes, from toadlike to demigods on Earth. So he was particularly excited the first day he entered the brothel to request the nymphlike boy always laid out on the divan tickling his colleagues and filching chocolates from the boxes johns had given to them; the boy had a lithe, small body with virtually no flaws of flesh or face and would be simple enough to paint.

Setting up in the private room, red-faced with excitement, Basil had the misfortune to turn around to find the boy stark naked and preparing himself for intercourse. In shame, he bolted from the room and couldn’t help but spill the entire wretched tale to Henry who characteristically laughed, fanning his concerns away like they were a heavy perfume. He went back and, through a panoply of stammers, stutters, and blushes, he communicated his true desires to the boy who seemed to understand well enough and they got along with a productive working relationship.

The boy was named Thomas, though he went by Williamson to his clients, and spent his days off at Sotheby's, watching the auctions, milling through crowds of the elite, drumming up business with convert smiles. He was a charming lad, well equipped for conversation, easy to laugh, and though Basil rarely responded, he had no trouble monologuing on his purseful of woes: the lady prostitutes riding on high horses, his cramped, damp flat, the poor price he went for, the amount of chocolates in the boxes Basil brought him that were filled with caramel instead of being purely chocolate, munching on the bonbons with a look of disgust marring his angelic features. 

On multiple occasions, Basil had slipped on his brush when Thomas pertly said some innuendo, a long strip of blue he was lucky hadn’t gone across the face. Long had he ignored the urges that cursed him of men in various stages of undress (their thumbs hooking under their braces, a bowtie around a white neck above an undone shirt, drawers pulled down exposing a sharp and shadowed hip bone) by convincing himself his admiration for the male form was on an exclusively aesthetic basis but the heightened sexual environment of the brothel room put him on an edge he tettered precariously on, arms windmilling, breath caught in a tight fist in his chest. 

It was when he was packing up his equipment for the day several weeks into their partnership when he turned to say his farewells to Thomas only to see him in the same state as their first day together, his lightly freckled chest peeking out of an open shirt and his trousers in a khaki-coloured puddle on the floor. 

Frozen in fear, Basil watched Thomas approach him, smiling shyly. “Mister Hallward,” he said, “please, would you take a seat.” He executed the order clumsily, stumbling backward onto a chair where Thomas knelt before him. “I’d like for you to enjoy this,” as he unfastened the front of his trousers and took Basil’s waiting prick into the wet recesses of his mouth. 

Basil avoided the brothel for many weeks afterward, satisfying his urges with the local fauna, cursing himself for his recession, mellowing in his own confusion. He attended gatherings with Henry, listlessly roaming to the quietest corner of the room with a full glass of wine, a nice heavy red, and drank until he became as useless as Henry in those early days. In time even painting lost its luster. His stomach turned whenever he saw the empty canvases stacked up next to his bed or the nearly full paint containers dotting his vanity and his mattress, sometimes he even rolled over onto them in the night, breaking them open so the sheets were streaked with olives and mauves like a puppet-show massacre. The fear that painting had only been a temporary fancy overtook him to its fullest extent. It was not just the time he supposedly wasted pursuing the art but the deeper existential horror of love lost. Like the delicate flame of a candle it had burned brightly and was wiped away with the wind in a soft sigh. Was it that his whole life would be a cycle of this? Becoming desperately enamoured with a thing of beauty for it to be nothing but ashes in a night?

No, he resolved, no. I am Basil Hallward, painter. So he returned to the brothel and to Thomas to discover the boy had left several days earlier without notice. His heart fell but, like an actress suspended on strings to give the appearance of flight, it quickly buoyed back to its rightful stature. He had returned on his own terms, had braved the dragon (so what if he had been out? It was Thomas who needed confronting), though, as he roped other working boys into his harem of vassals, he felt a longing for Thomas, as a friend and as a cohort. 

Thomas had been like him, a lover of men, not just for the financial security it provided him like the other boys, but for the pleasure of it. He had spoken of it often. It hadn’t affected Basil at the time, most things his subjects said washed over and around him to be recalled at a later date, but on further inspection, Thomas had seemed to be reading Basil’s mind. He also seemed to be sweet on him. Basil had seen Thomas at work, flirting with clients, he played the role of the abrasive coquet and played it well, yet when he propositioning Basil, his confidence evaporated, a rosy hue filled his cheeks, chocolate coloured eyes averted their gaze. This loss of kinship disheartened Basil.

He kept all of this from Henry, of course.

That is, he did not need to tell Henry.

It was after a birthday celebration for their mutual friend Edgar van Dieter, a jolly affair of foreign punch and tender racks of beef, sugared roses and tavern-dark lighting. Henry and Basil had managed to muddle their way to a bench using each other as a crutch and spoke in that free way of unpracticed drunks. Every word of the conversation they had was burned into Basil’s memory like the lyrics of a childhood lullaby.

“Basil, darling, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette?”

He supplied one, Nasty things, he thought personally, but Henry always forgot his in dorms and would paw at him anyway for a smoke.

“Thanks.”

“Darling. Am I your sweetheart now?”

“You would be a prettier one than most of the girls around here. That one - Victoria? A right nag her. Forever pulling me to her parents’ dinners. I do say she has got it into her that we’re courting.”

“I don’t I think shall ever start courting myself.”

“No? Why Basil, then you shall live the life of a wanton bachelor and tell all your delicious stories of hedonism to me.” He laughed then. A great belly laugh that turned into a cough. “I apologize. I couldn’t much say that with a straight face. I dare say you’ve never even kissed a girl.”

“I have too. You’ve haven’t seen me doing so because I don’t very often. I don’t enjoy kissing girls as much as I ought to I suppose. I don’t enjoy it at all.”

“At all?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence during which Basil’s collar felt very constraining.

“Basil, do you want to kiss me.”

“Yes.”

They did, hesitantly at first, all reluctant touches, hands cupping chins to steady their drunk shaking, lips lying on lips without movement, experimental, then building to wild fumbling, grasping at lapels, tongues pushing greedily into each other mouths. Basil’s heart threatened to run from his chest. He was half on Henry’s lap before he got sense of his surroundings and shyly pulled away. He didn’t get far because Henry drew him in hard again, gloved hands pawing at his cock.

Somehow they made it back to Basil’s room, its closer, they told themselves but really it’s because it will look less suspicious for Henry to slink out of Basil’s room looking bedraggled than the reverse. They couldn’t lie next to each other on the bed, it was too narrow so Henry covered Basil with his body. They acted like boys much younger than their real ages of nineteen, like they were back in public school, anxious to be free of their trousers. With naked hands, they wanked each other off and after two needy sounding orgasms, they laughed, delirious and exhausted, Henry took the bed only because Basil was a good host.

The pattern was repeated for several years until their last year at Oxford. By that point, Basil had deluded himself into believing he was in love with Henry. He had to be. You just don’t make love to another man for going on three years without something blossoming. That was why he was so crushed when Henry announced his intentions to marry Victoria. It was after a session and they were passing a cigarette back and forth (Basil had gotten into the habit, picked it up from Henry like a case of fleas) when Henry invited him to the wedding. “It’ll be a dull affair, no use pretending it won’t be with her mother planning the whole deal, but I’ll have a better time if you’re there.” Basil, speechless, agreed, privately sobbed in the place Henry’s head laid on his pillow.

Their friendship was strained in the time between. Any effort by Henry to initiate intimacy was met with callous glares. Basil spent his days painting in clandestine alcoves and his nights praying for a change of heart to strike Henry’s odious fiancee like a bolt of lightning. Alas, nothing of the sort happened so the night before the wedding Basil torched a painting he did of Henry in the nude.

The ceremony was surprisingly gorgeous. The day was one of those rare perfect days, puff clouds, crystal blue skies, a light breeze wafting through the church. Victoria, crowned with white roses, was beaming brightly, though Basil suspected that was mostly nerves than any sense of delight about her impending husband. Throughout the reception, Henry was keen to nudge Basil into the arms of any woman young enough for a fiance and any woman old enough for a lover and when that failed to work, before he was to bed his flush-faced bride, in the abandoned dining hall, conceded that maybe Basil is built solely for relations with other men. And Basil realized something.

He never was in love with Henry. No one was or ever could be, let alone Basil. He saw what in he saw in Thomas in Henry. He saw a kindred spirit. Henry’s eagerness and enthusiasm in bed was to Basil a reflective desire of freedom and that same kinship when really it was a horny college boy getting his kicks where they were cheapest to get them. When he understood this he laughed until he couldn’t breathe.

It was a joke between them afterwards. Their old amourous ways. They never fell back into their old routine in instances of boredom or lonesomeness, Henry even came to understand Basil’s inclinations and teased him mercilessly when he was told of Basil’s extinguished torch for him. “How could you not?” he said, preening.

Henry was the first and last man he slept with all his life. After university, he was much too busy seeking out a patron and diversifying his portfolio to find companionship, his constitution wasn’t strong enough for back alleys, quick release, and even quicker adieux, he thirsted for love and through his paintings was the easiest method of quenching his thirst. It wasn’t necessarily necessary for him to make money off his work, the Hallwards had a London house as all respectable families did where he was free to live and host but, more than anything, Basil wanted people to see his work, to see the people he captured within frames with pencil and paint. Basil put so much of himself into the portraits nearly every exhibition feels like narcissism with how self-portraitlike they are.

He was happy in the family home. Ida and Lucy dropped by on occasion with his nieces and nephews and Odgen came up for the Season. Mummy and Father ardently preferred the countryside and hardly ever made an appearance in society so, for the most part, he was alone with the servants. It’s only until a particular party that he wished to share the house.

When he first saw Dorian Gray, he was struck. When he first touched Dorian Gray he was struck again by the small spark of electricity that passed through the soft linen of their gloves. He was sure Dorian felt it too otherwise he would not been so easy to convince for a sitting.

Their days together were some of the most sublime in recent memory. Dorian posed for him and played the piano so sweetly and blushed like a rosebud under the summer sunshine. He fell asleep in the garden, hidden by flowers, lulled to unconsciousness by the warmth and the syrupy languor of their wine picnics. Basil sketched him like that, lost to the world, held by dreams. His thin chest rose and lowered below his loose shirt.

He was so peaceful, buttercups tickle his nose so he groans and curls up like a fussy kitten. 

There were no words in the English language, at least to Basil’s knowledge, that could describe the utter reverence he felt in Dorian’s presence. Perhaps in some long dead ancient language, there would be, in a civilization where people lived in fresh emerald fields, ripping juicy harvests of fruits from the smooth bark trees, like how the Esquimaux have fifty words for snow, these peoples would have fifty words for paradise.

As much as his loins quaked for the boy he could not bring himself to move on him. He was too pure for coupling with man or woman, above it all like a sexless angel watching detached and bemused at all the silly humans below go about their insignificant businesses. He worshipped the boy with all he is and the day Henry met him, his heart broke and so did Dorian. He came undone under Henry’s spell of gab.

Sibyl Vane arrived on the scene and Basil wasn’t sure what to make of her. Dorian was enamored, gushed about her every chance he got, though when Basil finally saw her on stage he didn’t see what the fuss was about. She was beautiful, unbelievably so, like a lily in a swamp, the beastliness of her surroundings only serving to elevate her beauty. However, the acting did leave something to be desired. An evil little thrill ran through him as she delivered her lines blandly, a thrill that said she’s not as talented as he and Dorian, once he realizes this, will come back with arms spread.

Despite his jealousy, Basil was saddened when he read of her suicide. He should have liked to paint her and Dorian together, the sun and the moon. It was unfair someone so lovely, so full of promise, was gone so quickly.

Dorian didn’t mind as much as Basil would have him. In the intervening years, he attached himself to the dandies of the era, bright young things wild-eyed and affectionate. He disposed of these friends like he did Basil, moving onto the next one once he lost interest. Maybe Basil would have been able to forget, to heal, if Dorian’s exploits weren’t the topic of every dinner party or the headlines of Saturday’s papers. He empathized so strongly his heart throbbed. He sought out Dorian’s abandoned friends and found them opium-addicted, destitute, squirreled away in attics like lunatic wives in a gothic horror novel. He supposed he was lucky he remained still sane after his time with Dorian. 

The years twisted and passed and Basil turned to his first love. His fame grew but Dorian didn't notice or if he did he didn’t care. 

In the dark streets of London he searched for beautiful boys in darker rooms. Boys with golden hair and innocent faces and he couldn’t bring himself to love them. He’d fuck them hard, spoil their innocence and he wouldn’t have done that to Dorian then so he couldn’t do it now. He convinced himself Dorian hadn’t changed. 

He’d be in Paris tomorrow.

It had been twenty years since he first laid eyes of Dorian Gray and it was like the first day. Not a wrinkle marred his marble cheeks.

He begged for the portrait but once he has seen it he wished he never had. It was a grotesque mirror. Never again shall he put himself into a painting. He turned to go. He couldn’t bear to be in the presence of such a cursed creature. His mind raced and then it was cut short. 

The pain was a fire, each stab was a cup of gasoline. It burnt through him. He fell on the chair, tried to cover his head, remembering and regretting. 

A splash of red fell over his eyes like a curtain in front of a cast of actors. He thought it would be the perfect red to paint a sunrise.


End file.
